[mxcrossb]

For the list of mutations, there is a convenient Wikipedia article [1]. For example, the South Africa variant has mutation E484K which means mutate amino acid 484 from Glutamic Acid to Lysine. It’s just that simple; you could even download a spike protein crystal structure from RCSB and try rolling your own mutations!

Why a mutation improves transmission takes a lot of investigating to understand. I am not sure why you were under the impression that we know the mechanisms. If you type something like “E484K molecular dynamics” you can find a lot of computer simulations trying to investigate the mechanism, this is standard biological research. Of course we E484K you have a mutation from a negative to a positive residue, so that might give you a hint why it’s harder for the antibody to stick.

I can assure you that here in Japan we do not care about Trump. Perhaps we should be more grateful to his good support for the Pfizer vaccine, which is the one we are now deploying at scale (after the government here did their own review of the evidence).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variants_of_SARS-CoV-2